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Digital culture and communications

Local searches

Targeting London, Manchester or Birmingham as a marketeer may just be getting a little easier. Hitwise released data yesterday from a new analytics tool which helps them pinpoint who’s searching for what on the web in any particular location.

What’s interesting for me is that the Liverpool Echo was visited more times than the BBC site.

But then again, is it really that surprising?

As we’ve discussed before, the Internet is all about communities, be they small or big, local or global. SO it makes sense that the first news resource you’d look at would be that of your home town, where you live your life – not an ethereal news network telling stories about stuff happening in a distant land. I say ethereal as the news that many mainstream sites punlish is not ‘real’ to the people reading it.

So how can this help marketers? Well initially it leads to advertising advantages. Recently:

Alcatel-Lucent and partner 1020 Placecast announced a wireless carrier-based solution that promises to marry user location with relevant ads. Sounds good, but call me skeptical. The technology might be ready, but consumers are still mostly on the sidelines, and just as important so are advertisers.

And what with GPS now a common feature on mobile phones, the location/advertising model seems to fit. If you walk into a town centre and are sent an sms message with links to various attractions, banks or restaurants, free of charge to you, wouldn’t that be a good thing? Or even better, you text what you’re after to one number that doesn’t change, for example ‘Hotels’, no matter where you are, and it will give you a list of hotels in the area. The vendor makes their money by selling the links or info in the text as an advert.

The net has brought the global local and made the local extremely accessible indeed.